Gingerbread
by froodlemonkey
Summary: "No," said Dash. "No, no, no, a thousand times no, and then no some more."


"No," said Dash. "No, no, no, a thousand times no, and then no some more."

"Is that a definite-no or a maybe-no?" asked Mars, shifting his rucksack on his shoulders.

Dash scowled. "It's a gingerbread house," he said. "An honest-to-God, real-life-sized cottage made of candy, set in the deepest heart of the Eerie Woods, which, by the way, is a name that would make any normal person stay far away, not go diving in on the hunt for edible architecture."

"Nobody forced you to come with us," said Marshall.

Dash shrugged. "You would have needed me to come bail you out anyway," he said. "This way I don't have to wander around trying to find you before stepping in and heroically saving your ass."

Marshall sputtered. Dash smirked. Simon took photos, some for the evidence locker, some just for the photo album he planned on giving the Tellers at Thanksgiving.

"Anyway," said Mars, once he'd recovered his composure. "Now that we're here, we have to check it out."

"It's our duty," Simon agreed.

"There is, at minimum, a one hundred and ten percent chance that there's a child-eating witch in that building," said Dash.

"Yeah," said Mars. "And kids are missing, and we're here to investigate and put an end to her reign of cannibalistic terror. Right, Simon?"

"I was born for this," said Simon, nodding.

"This is stupid," said Dash.

Mars picked up a long stick from the forest floor and, careful to keep his feet well away from the edges of a lime-green lawn that appeared to be made of sour apple chews and was bordered by fantailed ice-cream wafers with chocolate and sprinkle-covered edges, used it to give the wall of the cottage an experimental prod.

A shortbread round came away in a shower of crumbs, and what might have been a blackcurrant reduction oozed darkly from the sponge-cake yellow wall beneath. It looked like blackcurrant reduction, but the rank metallic smell and the way it pooled on the surface of the exposed wall made Mars think of old, black blood moving under an infected wound that refuses to close.

"That's it, I'm gone," said Dash.

"Don't be such a wuss," said Mars, who was now poking the end of the stick into the hole he had gouged in the cottage wall.

"You can't just leave," said Simon. "There's possibly a flesh-eating old lady in these woods and we might have to stop her from maybe carrying out her nefarious scheme to devour all the kids in Eerie."

"There's a lot of maybe in that sentence," said Dash. "Also, and more importantly, I don't care. You two, Junior Monster Hunters Incorporated, are the only kids I know in this town, and I don't even really like you all that much. I'm for sure not risking my neck for a bunch of brats that I've never met."

"Sounds to me like you're chicken," said Mars, pulling the stick back and examining the viscous substance adhering to the tip. He pulled a zip-locked evidence bag from the backpack containing his portable monster fighting kit, and carefully broke off the branch end to make it fit inside. "Chicken."

"I'm not-"

"Not what? Not a chicken? Sounds just like something a chicken would say."

"No, I just-"

"Cluck cluck cluck."

"Teller, I sw-"

"Bu-caw!"

Dash threw up his hands in defeat.

"Fine, whatever. Be an idiot, get us all killed. Your parents have another kid, right? Probably be relieved to get rid of you, if they even notice you're gone."

"We're just gonna look around," promised Simon. "It'll only take a few minutes, and we'll be really careful."

"Stupid," muttered Dash, but he followed them up the garden path made from popping candy to the door tiled in overlapping layers of Thin Mints. The sugar-glass windows showed dark, empty rooms, and no sound came from within.

They stood on the doorstep made from peanut brittle and exchanged apprehensive glances. Mars pulled his jacket sleeve over his hand and reached out to test the lock, and the door swung open.

From the outside, the cottage had seemed quiet and deserted. When the door opened, the noise that emerged was almost a physical thing, driving them back a few steps, their feet sticking in the soft, sour-apple grass of the lawn.

The cottage was full of screaming children. They swarmed underfoot, jumped on partially-collapsed sofas and climbed on countertops, banged toys against other toys, or walls, or each other, all the time shrieking like banshees who have never learned the concept of the indoor voice.

In the middle of the chaos sat an old woman in an easy chair, swathed in shawls and blankets so that only her wizened, clouded eyes could be seen. These milky eyes fixed on the three boys and a gnarled and bony hand extended from the mismatched pile of fabric, beckoning them in. Though the noise made by Eerie's missing children was deafening, when she spoke, her thin, quavering voice was clearly audible.

"Come in, dears," she said. "Have a piece of cake, or some candyfloss, or perhaps you would prefer ice cream?"

"Oh," said Marshall, trying to take another step backwards and finding that the soft, yielding surface of the chewable grass had melded around his feet and was now holding him in place. "Uh... no thanks. I might spoil my dinner, or something."

"Smooth," hissed Dash, whose trenchcoat had just barely brushed the lawn and which was now slowly being encased in hardened sour apple candy. He managed to wriggle out of it and dropped it to the floor, abandoned to it's sticky fate.

The old lady smiled.

"Oh, but all these sweet treats give children such energy," she said. Behind her, a boy in corduroy dungarees and a Doctor Terwilliger cap banged a metal car against the hardwood floor, screaming as he did so. A long string of grape soda-coloured spittle hung from his lower lip.

"I can see that," said Simon. "But unfortunately we're diabetic, so we should probably just go..."

"Yeah," agreed Dash. "Your kids look great, super energised and stuff, but we don't wanna get tooth decay or anything. See ya." He tried to turn, but with a Godzilla-like shriek, an ice-cream-sticky toddler flung herself from the peanut-brittle step onto his leg and sank her small, even milk teeth into his calf.

The witch in the candy cottage smiled beatifically as his curses and threats joined the general cacophony.

"Dearest little ones," she sighed. "So lively, so full of get up and go. Just being around them makes a body feel younger."

A child with an unruly mop of brown curls and the red-rimmed thousand-yard stare of a full-blown corn syrup addict launched himself at Simon with a frenzied squeal of delight. Simon went down in a mass of flailing limbs and half-sucked boiled sweets.

The old woman grinned at Marshall, who belatedly realised that she was no longer old at all.

"Are you quite sure you wouldn't like a snack?" she purred, getting to her feet. The shawls and blankets tumbled away with the movement, and she was naked beneath them, strong and lithe, with pieces of hard candy embedded in her flesh at her chakra points.

She filled the air with the smell of burning sugar and fresh popcorn, and the noise of the cottage seemed to fade away, until it was just Marshall and the witch of the candy cottage, her hair dark and smooth as melted chocolate, her skin as pale and perfect as the soft underside of a creme brulee after you crack the hard shell on top. She held out a toffee apple, and her smile was the same slow, wicked smile that the serpent must have worn in Eden.

The sour apple grass still held him in place, and he knew if he struggled, if he lost his balance and fell, it would envelope him and he would die choking on chewable imitation fruit flavoured candy speckled with crunchy bits. He slipped the backpack from his shoulders and scrabbled frantically inside it for anything he could use as a weapon.

The squirt gun full of holy water did nothing but make her squeal and shiver in the cold spray, and when he held up the crucifix to ward her off, she laughed at him and called him a silly boy. When he pulled out the wooden stake, she crossed the distance between them, wrapped her fingers around his and breathed butterscotch-scented breath in his face as she thanked him for such a thoughtful present, and said it was sure to be useful the next time she made cotton candy.

When he pulled out the garlic bolo, he had a vague, frantic thought that he could loop it around her neck and strangle her with it. Instead she hissed and stepped back, and the clinging, living grass recoiled with her, peeling away from Marshal's feet to reveal dead brown earth beneath, and surging instead around the witch's calves, like a frightened child running to it's mother.

Overconfident, he stepped forward to drive her back to the cottage, tripped on the sticky dirt underfoot, and fell. The bulb of garlic crumpled and burst under his hand, releasing it's pungent smell and smearing his palm with a sticky, savoury-smelling paste.

The sugar-crazed zombies in the cottage fell silent, turning to stare at the fallen boy. Their nostrils flared as they inhaled deeply, and one by one, they stepped over the threshold and out into the garden. The witch screamed at them to stop, to go back inside. She promised them treats, liquorice and coconut ice and fudge in all the flavours of the world, but they paid her no mind, and with each one that stepped through the candy-cane doorframe and out into the sun, the hard candy gems on her body grew dull, and her voice lost it's strength.

The candy cottage teetered and rotted even as Mars struggled to get to his feet. Grey-green mould raced across the gingerbread facia, the sugar-glass windows melted and dissolved, and chocolate buttons rained from the sky as the chimney stack fell in. The witch aged and diminished with it, shrivelling and collapsing in on herself, until all that remained of the woman and the building that had been both her home and her lure was a pile of half-chewed gummy worms and stained popsicle sticks.

When the missing children had been lead to Eerie's municipal park with the promise of spaghetti and meatballs and garlic bread if they behaved, the boys returned, armed with supersoakers full of ordinary tap water, and washed the ground clean.

Weeks later, lying awake on a hot summer night, Marshall thought he could smell the faintest trace of popcorn and burnt sugar coming from the forest, though he never mentioned it to the others.


End file.
